Despite the discovery of the standard model (SM)
Higgs boson, there are still unanswered questions that are not explained
by the SM, such as the nature of the chiral structure of weak
interactions. During Run-1 at the LHC, no clear signs for physics beyond
the SM were seen, but there were a few hints of possible new physics.
One particular hint was a 2.8\sigma excess seen at the CMS experiment in
the search for a heavy right-handed W and heavy neutrino. These
particles arise when a left-right symmetry is added to the electroweak
sector.

A limit-periodic structure consists of a union of periodic
patterns with no largest lattice constant.
The discovery of an aperiodic monotile -- a single tile that forces
hexagonal limit-periodic pattern in the same way that the two Penrose tiles
force a quasicrystalline pattern -- has opened a new path to the theory of
formation of a limit-periodic phase and to its possible physical realization. A renormalization analysis shows that the
limit-periodic ground state can be reached in a slow quench through an infinite
sequence of phase transitions, and numerical studies indi

The growth and evolution of
galaxies is fueled by gas accretion from circum-/intergalactic gas reservoirs.
In turn, gas accretion and cooling is regulated by outflows and heating from
supernovae and active galactic nuclei. These outflows enrich the intergalactic
medium with heavy elements and produce massive baryon reservoirs in the form of
diffuse halo gas. Consequently, the diffuse gas of the inter- and
circum-galactic medium (IGM/CGM) represent a sensitive laboratory for studying
the accretion and feedback processes that regulate galaxy evolution.

Emilio Mendez: Director of Energy Science and Technology, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Professor of Physics, Stony Brook University

The properties of materials are in general determined by chemical
composition and structure, but at the nanoscale they depend on size as
well. As one or more dimensions of a material become increasingly
smaller, not only can it inhabit ever smaller spaces; also its surface
to volume ratio increases, and at a small enough size (typically well
below 100 nm) a number of the material’s properties become governed by
quantum mechanics.

Phenotypic plasticity is known to arise in varying habitats where it
diminishes harmful environmental effects. How plasticity shapes genetic
architecture of traits under varying selection is unknown. Using an
analytic approximation and Monte Carlo simulations, we show that
balanced polymorphism and recombination modification arise
simultaneously as a consequence of epistatic plastic modification in
periodic environments.

Analyzing whole genome sequences provides an unprecedented resolution of
the historical demography of populations. In the process, most
inferential methods either ignore or simplify the confounding effects of
recombination and population history on the observed polymorphism.
Going further, we build upon an existing analytic approach that
partitions the genome into blocks of equal (and arbitrary) size and
summarizes the polymorphism and linkage information as blockwise counts
of SFS types (bSFS).

Since
the discovery of graphene via mechanical exfoliation, it has been shown that the
electronic properties of solids can undergo dramatic change when the material
thickness is reduced to the atomic limit. Recently, the quality of these 2-dimensional
(2D) electronic systems has been significantly improved by hexagonal boron
nitrides encapsulation, enabling the electron mean free path only limited by
the size of the samples. However, mesoscopic transport studies in these systems
are relatively unexplored due to the challenges in the device fabrication
processes.

Fereshte Ghahari Kermani, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Berry phase is an example of anholonomy, where the
phase of a quantum state may not return to its original value after its
parameters cycle around a closed path; instead the quantum system’s wave
function may acquire a real, measurable phase difference, known as Berry phase.
Berry phase is connected with the
geometry of the quantum system having intriguing physical consequences
in systems with topological singularities, such as graphene.

In the first part of the seminar I will discuss some
of the effects that massive neutrinos induce on the large-scale structure of
the Universe, from their impact on the clustering of halos, galaxies and voids
to their signatures on the BAO. In the second part of the seminar I will
discuss the possibility of using the hydrogen 21cm line to study cosmology.

A common goal in data-analysis is to sift through a large matrix and
detect any significant submatrices (i.e., biclusters) that have a low
numerical rank. To give an example from genomics, one might imagine a
data-matrix involving several genetic-measurements taken across many
patients. In this context a ‘bicluster’ would correspond to a subset of
genetic-measurements that are correlated across a subset of the
patients. While some biclusters might extend across most (or all) of the
patients, it is also possible for biclusters to involve only a small
subset of patients.